MDA is unique. It has unique opportunities that will keep you challenged and growing. It has a good culture for staff below that at the management level with organised events, skit nights and sports. If you want to know how engineering is done well then this is the company for you.

Cons

MDA keeps people by keeping them challenged and training the staff up to get better paying jobs somewhere else. However many of those jobs are somewhere other than in BC so it manages to keep the pay low as staff have few opportunities locally. The younger staff see this and tend to leave within their first 5 to 7 years. MDA needs to realise that it does alot of software and adjust to the reality that comes with being a software company, like pay, like working arrangements and like cutting edge software techniques!

- The people are great for the most part, with a ton of very friendly and very helpful peers to draw on for knowledge. Skill of employees is variable, but there are at least a few highly skilled people in each discipline to ensure project success.- Occasionally there are amazing projects to work on, though these are becoming rare.- I've learned so much working here, and have been very lucky with what I've worked on and who I've worked with.- I have a lot of cons below, mostly because I care and wish things were back to the old days of dynamism, can-do attitudes. It could come back, but a lot will have to change first.

Cons

- Senior management and executives are fearful of competition in commercial space endeavours, despite having been far in the lead world-wide in relevant technologies. That lead has eroded, and management prefers that we assume the usual role as a sub-contractor for hire.

- Gross inefficiency is everywhere and sometimes even encouraged. This lowers morale and further lowers efficiency.

- Dead wood is kept around. Some staff have severely atrophied skills, and many people are wholly bought-in to out-dated processes and baggage from old programs, or are incapable of making a decision.

- Potential customers are sometimes turned off by our high price. Overheads are high.

- Careers are stagnating both in technical staff and management. Result is a lot of cruft clogging up the advancement chain, little fiefdoms in line management and above, and ultimately poor program performance.

- Canada's gov't is incapable of making a commitment to space programs without the US first leading the way, so there have not been (m)any real new flight programs in Brampton in several years. A decade of prototypes gets old after a while, and as mentioned, management is unwilling to take matters into their own hands on the commercial side.

- There is an overt adversarial relationship between HR and technical staff. I was amazed at this when I joined, assuming HR is supposed to be on the employees' side and that employees would negotiate with management. Not the case.

- Others have mentioned the pay situation. Yeah it's lower than industry averages by a considerable margin, and yeah that's a stated part of the company's business plan because they know that few space opportunities exist in Canada. Historically, attrition has been right where they wanted it. But good people are leaving regularly now and morale is pretty low.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Take risks. We need to, at this point. Invest in internal R&D or there will be no future of innovation at MDA. We can still compete if you allow real change. Stop shuffling the chairs. Yearly re-organization is not helpful unless you allow for corporate and cultural change in parallel with it.